In the field of digital logic, extensive use is made of well-known and highly developed complimentary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. As CMOS has begun to approach maturity as a technology, there is an interest in alternatives that may lead to higher performance in terms of speed, power dissipation computational density, interconnect bandwidth, and the like. An alternative to CMOS technology comprises superconductor-based single flux quantum circuitry, utilizing superconducting Josephson junctions, with typical signal power of around four nanowatts, at a typical data rate of twenty gigabits per second, or greater, and operating temperatures of around four kelvins.
A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured, after manufacturing, to produce one or more customized logic output functions. An FPGA can contain an array of programmable logic blocks and, in some cases, a hierarchy of reconfigurable interconnects between logic blocks. The logic blocks can include memory elements. High performance computing (HPC) systems use FPGAs to accelerate computation per unit of expended energy. FPGAs have conventionally been fabricated as CMOS devices.